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Re: installboot is broken



On 03/24/2013 08:52 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-03-24 19:25, Anders Magnusson wrote:
On 03/24/2013 05:48 PM, Martin Husemann wrote:
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 04:39:45PM +0100, Anders Magnusson wrote:
Vax only have one bootblock which is installed in the first 16 sectors
on the disk.
The boot block is the same for all different disk types. Which is
nice :-)
Yes, indeed - but Jonny claims the conversion to this sheme broke
preparation of completely zeroed/new disks for 11/750 and others (but
not for micro vaxen, which is the only hardware I have).
You mean the installboot usage, or something else?  Vax has had a
unified boot block on NetBSD ~forever.  It was installed by newfs
earlier but now it needs installboot.

I thought I remembered disklabel doing the installation of the boot block, but I might be misremembering.
You could do it with disklabel as well. disklabel -B -b xxboot would do the trick :-)

All machines that have PROM-VMB + 11/750 and VAX8200 (with ROM routines)
works correctly.

I wonder. Does the 11/750 really work now? I have a feeling it will not.

If the boot block gets installed correctly it will.
Hm, it sounds odd that a boot block problem hasn't been noticed for quite some time since the new installboot were introduced.


For other machines the boot program is installed on the frontend media
(RX11, RL02 or something) so the boot blocks are never used.

Ragge, that was ages ago. :-)
We have not used out own boot program on the FE media since 2.0 or something. I still have a copy around on my FE RL02 just in case something really bad happens, and I need it, but I have not used it in ages.
Actually this is still the supported way :-)

I think I added some stuff to the boot blocks to let VMB recognize and load the blocks needed when I wrote the VAX8800 support, because I had difficulties to access the PC350 console media. It may be that it just worked on all other machines with console media also.

The 11/750 initially needed to load the boot code from the TU58 (as 4.2BSD needed), but that was fixed before the 1.0 release IIRC.

-- Ragge


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